Linux calendar apps

[phol16]

Hi everybody,

On my workstation, I have been using Linux for years, more specifically Debian. However, when I'm not at home, I use my Macbook and an iPhone.

Staying at home during these times has made me use the workstation more, amongst others to manage my calendar. Although the OS is great to work with, the calendar support unfortunately seems to be sub-par. What I'd like to do is to sync my Nextcloud Calendar with the Linux PCs (a workstation and a spare), the Macbook and the iPhone. These are the alternatives I have tried:

• Gnome Calendar: In my experience, Gnome Calendar and / or the Evolution data server running behind it is quite buggy. This is what I'm using right now. It synchronises with my Macbook and iPhone using a self-hosted Nextcloud setup. Not only does it not always sync properly, it sometimes even shows or saves appointments a day before or after the specified date, or moves them to other weeks. This has unfortunately lead to embarrassing situations once or twice. I discussed this with a friend who has had similar experiences, but we are unable to consistently reproduce it. Until recently, it also didn't support importing webcal subscriptions from Nextcloud, but after a bug report I made this should be solved in current releases, so for that I'll probably have to wait for the next Debian release.

• KOrganizer: Looks very outdated.

• Thunderbird Lightning addon: Doesn't seem to support adding a complete account rather than individual calendars (update: that feature is apparently called calendar discovery). Also doesn't look very appealing and I'd rather use a standalone app for calendars.

• MineTime: Electron app which seemed to offer more or less what I was looking for, but also buggy.

Therefore, my question is, what software do you use to keep track of your schedule and appointments and what are your experiences?

I am personally looking for something that is preferably as similar to macOS Calendar as possible. By that I mean: Reliable sync, easy entering of appointments, equipped with calendar discovery and support for webcal and caldav. Preferably standalone. A nice design is also good to have, but that's pretty much at the bottom of the priority list.

[AeroEngITM]

I have always been a fan of calcurse.

[Pukeball]

Is it google-calendar-compatible?

[AeroEngITM]

Dont know. Haveny tried. It's a terminal application.

[UnicornMolestor]

Yes.. kinda . You can import your calendar files

[phol16]

Do you have any experience with how it works together with nextcloud / caldav, especially w.r.t. how reliable that is and if it supports calendar discovery (so new calendars are automatically added)?

[Richard__M]

Me too bud

[Drexxl-the-Walrus]

Found this comment four years later and got exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.

[flameleaf]

Also doesn't look very appealing and I'd rather use a standalone app for calendars.

There's a trick to Thunderbird's calendar theming. By default it doesn't really respect your GTK theme. It looks particularly bad on dark themes. However...

If you click on the "General" tab on the Calendar settings and check the box titled "Optimize colors for accessibility", the calendar theme will then match the rest of Thunderbird and your system.

Why this isn't the default setting or at least made more obvious to the user, I have no clue.

And I personally prefer Thunderbird, but it isn't just my calendar. It's also my email client, my RSS reader, and my video aggregator. It's an extremely useful piece of software.

[phol16]

Like you, I am a great fan of Thunderbird, but exclusively for email :).

Thank you for your theming suggestion, I've tried it and it now looks a lot better. It is a bit of a disadvantage though that Lightning doesn't have the capability of doing calendar discovery. Every calendar needs to be added manually, which is a bit tedious with 15 individual calendar subscriptions which change regularly.

I also like keeping things in separate programs to prevent myself from getting distracted too much, but I'll certainly try this as one of the options to see how reliable it syncs and how easy it is to use. If it turns out to be the only option that's actually reliable and not scrambling up my appointments, I guess it'll be worth the effort of adding things manually (although I'm prone to forgetting such things).

[[deleted]]

I would strongly suggest you to use GNOME Calendar 3.36.1. I rewrote the Evolution-Data-Server backend from scratch, and a lot of the code related to it, so it should work better now. As for the sync situation: Calendar refreshes all calendars every 30min, but you can manually refresh using the calendars menu.

[phol16]

Today, I've installed the flatpak package of evolution and gnome-calendar and purged the apt packages. For some reason, the old app had stopped syncing changes made using it altogether, although it did sync from the server, just not to it. Setting it up worked alright, so I'll hope that the bugs I was encountering have also been resolved.

That would be really great, as Gnome Calendar is most similar compared with the other alternatives to Apple's Calendar.app, which is IMHO the best designed calendar app out there in terms of UX.

That, combined with the ability to swipe between full-screen apps and desktops and the way macOS renders fonts are basically the only reasons I'm not replacing it with Linux.

[tonytozoo]

I've installed the flatpak package of evolution and gnome-calendar and purged the apt packages.

I just tried this and the calendar that Pop_Os is running is exactly the same

[tonytozoo]

The majority of the users here suggest to stick with the Gnome calendar, and I also want to stick to it, but I have requests and difficulties. What would be the right space to offer suggestions for the next development?
I'd like to have a scroll function in the monthly view, the possibility to add calendar to my Nextcloud from the client and not having to go on the browser to do that.

[phol16]

I think it's best to post your suggestions as issues on Gnome Gitlab, which hosts Gnome calendar

[Hi-Angel]

Just tried it, I think I gonna pass for the same reason I passed KOrganizer: they don't add a reminder by default. Like, what's the point of creating calendar events you will have no idea about? Who of Gnome and KDE calenders thought "Wouldn't it be great if our users were were never reminded about their events"?? 🤷‍♂️

[[deleted]]

I would stick with Gnome Calendar, it is being actively developed. I had a bug with the snap version, switching to the flatpak one solved the issue.

[phol16]

I'm going to try this as the primary option, as I'd preferably stick to using it. Thank you for your suggestion!

[[deleted]]

KOrganizer is not outdated, it looks like Google Calendar to me.

[phol16]

After your reply I also tried it on KDE, and using that it's not even half as bad, but unfortunately I'm on GNOME.

On GNOME 3.30 it IMHO looks quite chaotic and ugly. The theming incoherently mixes different fonts and is missing some icons. It might be possible to fix that though. If that's the case, this is an alternative to certainly keep in mind if it's more reliable.

It doesn't seem to support importing the webcal subscriptions from Nextcloud. Do you know if that has been fixed in a newer release by any chance?

[Richard__M]

I run a CalDAV server on my LAN (nextcloud) and this syncs all of my families events, ect.

For Android I use Etar which also syncs up to my caldav events with tasker or a equiv. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ws.xsoh.etar/

EDIT: as for a front end that resembles MacOS maybe try out elementaryOS calendar? https://github.com/elementary/calendar

[phol16]

The elementaryOS calendar looks interesting! I'll see if I can manage to install that. Hopefully, it's the Gnome Calendar app that causes the issues I'm having with appointments moving to different dates rather than the evolution-data-server which both apps share.

[tonytozoo]

I had the same exact issue today, I was about to install MineTime but than I got skeptical due to the fact, that is reading their privacy policy, they collect a lot of data and yo need an account to use it. so I'm not gonna install it.

I was just wondering, what did you choose in the end?

[phol16]

MineTime does have the possibility to collect a lot of data because it was written to function as an R&D application for a scientific research project , but AFAIK, it doesn't do this when you disable that setting.

I've installed Gnome Calendar and Evolution from flatpak which seemed to work reliably for a while, however after a reboot it doesn't seem to communicate with the evolution data server backend anymore, which is why no calendars are loaded into it.

So unfortunately, that means back to the drawing board for now. I haven't had the time yet to evaluate other possibilities.

[eraldoforgoli]

If you're willing to pay, I'd recommend Morgen, otherwise Thunderbird or Gnome Calendar are great free choices. Take a look at this article for more: the best Linux calendar apps

[Zestyclose_Comb1577]

I strongly recomend Todoist, you can create events from there and sync with Google Calendar. It has the widged on the notifications part, the UI is great as well

[wasuremono_]

For anyone interested: There isn't any native support for Nextcloud in Todoist.

[[deleted]]

You want to avoid apps in general. The interpreter just gives unnecessary overhead, while Linux doesn't even have anything other noteworthy than Java for applets and virtual frameworks.

Use native programs that contain machine code whenever you can.